Ridgeline expands Basin water processing presence

Published 8:01 am, Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Already operating a plant in Southeastern New Mexico capable of processing 2,500 barrels of waste water per day, Calgary, Canada-based Ridgeline Energy Services, Inc. is expanding that plant and adding one south of Odessa.

The New Mexico plant expansion is already completed and the new Odessa plant should be in operation by late July, according to company CEO Dennis M. Danzik. As per the company's business model, both facilities will serve a single client. Neither client can be named due to contractual agreements. Ridgeline's top customers nationwide are ConocoPhillips and EOG Resources.

The reason for building single-company facilities is, "Our primary directive from our clients is to control trucks," Danzik explained. "That's how we make this work."

Cost is one factor in reducing the number of trucks hauling water to salt water disposal (SWD) wells, but many of Ridgeline's clients are concerned about the overall environmental impact of obtaining and disposing of produced water in waterfloods, including the damage done to roads in the trucking process.

Saying, "We don't chase (fracturing) crews," Danzik explained that his company's facilities are a permanent fixture. "Our facilities are for water treatment, typically at a battery."

Most customers want the treatment facility and the disposal well right at the tank battery, for the previously stated purpose of cutting down on truck traffic. Clients want Ridgeline to "treat as much water as possible for beneficial use," Danzik explained. "That use will be to go back into more hydraulic stimulation or for whatever the oil and gas company wants to do with it.... It cuts back on the use of water dramatically as it stands."

Ridgeline's system has the capability to bring water to agricultural standards or even for drinking standards, but, due to added expense, clients rarely ask for this level of treatment. On a typical site they can bring as much as 90 percent of the produced water up to reusable standards.

The amount and type of processing depends on two main things: what substances are in the water and the level to which the client needs the water cleaned.

One thing that has fueled the boom in water treatment is the reduction of its cost. In the four years that Ridgeline has been in the water treatment business (the company as a whole is 11 years old) the cost to set up a plant has dropped from about $3 million to just over $500,000, "as technology is getting better and better and better," Danzik said.

Noting that Basin area operators have begun tapping into brine formations at around 7-800 feet, Danzik said his company's technology could clean that water and reduce its salinity to make it usable for waterflooding.

Changes in the regulatory climate has also helped. "The state of Texas did a great thing by allowing (producers) to blend water and put into storage anything under 2,500 ppm of chlorides," he said. "That is a big help because, the problem was, a lot of the waste water laws and EPA rules were written under industrial discharge standards" originally. This is because hydraulic fracturing, while invented in the 1940s, has only proliferated in the last few years, so regulations did not need to take it into account. He feels Texas and Wyoming are the leaders in rewriting these regulations to accommodate the different disposal requirements of the oil industry as opposed to manufacturing.

With its rapid growth in the oil and gas market, Danzik said Ridgeline's expansion in the treatment of industrial water is moving even faster. The company makes most of its own equipment in a factory in Arizona, but they are looking to Wyoming and Texas as possible future plant locations. Acknowledging that hiring in Texas may be a challenge, Danzik believes the company may expand into Wyoming first.